


Catching Up

by Whiggity



Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon & Comics)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-23
Updated: 2019-11-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:21:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21534379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whiggity/pseuds/Whiggity
Summary: “I’ll catch up,”Wirt had promised, but he never said when. That was the loophole in the deal. Greg just had to be patient.(For "Prince of the Unknown")
Comments: 7
Kudos: 93





	Catching Up

**Author's Note:**

  * For [xathira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xathira/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Another Beast Born](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21030746) by [xathira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xathira/pseuds/xathira). 



> You _could _read this without the greater context of xathira's excellent "Prince of the Unknown" series, but why would you want to?__
> 
> This is pretty insubstantial, but I felt an itch, so

Greg usually woke up with the sun, but on the morning of the last day before Christmas Break, the sun came up too slow and quiet for him to realize until he was already running late. “Oh, peanuts,” he mumbled into his pillow as he peeked at the clock; six-forty-two A.M.! The light outside the window was hard gray, and the tree-branches wore fresh fluffy sweaters. “Alright, Commander Spock. We don’t have to like it, but we got no choice.”

Jason Funderburker rolled over under the covers and shivered; this time of year was hard for the frog, so Greg tucked him up inside his shirt to keep him warm while he got dressed. The snowfall of the night before had faded off into little spits of flakes, white on white flying by the windows like the breadcrumbs that came out of Greg’s mouth when he ate a sandwich too fast. He pulled a sweater on top of his snow pants and fished mittens out of the pile of clothes in the corner, but now that he was wearing them, he realized he couldn’t open the slippery doorknob. Every day a new adventure, lately.

“Gee whiz,” he laughed, and hung them around his neck.

Greg padded carefully down the stairs and into the kitchen, slip-shuffling in his socks with a frog still stuffed down the front of his shirt. The air here smelled like coffee and Mr. Guiterrez’s enchilada tray, left out on the counter overnight. Delicious, but not a breakfast food. There was exactly one thing that Greg was allowed to do where the stove was concerned, and that was turn the kettle on. _“Instant oatmeal, apple oatmeal,”_ he sang to himself while he hauled a chair over so he could reach the dials. _“Food for boys, not just a goat-meal.”_ The burner ticked and blushed. Cereal would have been quicker, but it was too cold a morning for that; Dad had forgotten to turn the heat on before he left, and Greg wasn’t allowed to change the thermostat, even with the help of a chair.

Jason Funderburker, having finally cultivated a healthy froggy body temperature and appetite, was starting to wriggle, eyeing some of the dead flies in the kitchen windowsill. Greg turned him out onto the table to eat while they waited for the water to boil. Crumbled snow surrounded a dark patch in the driveway where Dad’s car had been parked; the new snowfall wasn’t sticking to the wet concrete, which meant school probably wasn’t canceled. Not that you ever had to learn anything on the last day before vacation anyway. As the clock in the living room chirped seven, the kettle clicked to a whistle, and Greg balanced on the chair very carefully to pour the water over his oatmeal. It was a good and toasty breakfast, just what the doctor ordered, but still missing the special flavor that food has when someone else makes it for you.

He was getting used to that.

The stairs were quiet and the halls were quiet, but a friendly wind sang around the edges of the kitchen windowpane, so Greg whistled along as he carefully divided the newspaper funny pages. “Okay,” he told Jason Funderburker. “I’m Wirt today, and you’re me. If Wirt shows up before we leave, then he can be you, but we don’t have to worry about that for now. Understand?” The frog nodded; they had a routine. Greg, like Wirt, took the full first page of the comics and began to read them out loud to Jason Funderburker, who listened as raptly as Greg always had; in truth, Greg couldn’t read very well yet, but he’d told the frog he could, and the lie had taken on a life of its own in the last couple months. He narrated the events of Dick Tracy as plausibly as he could: _“’Run home!’”_ he cried with a finger on the first panel. _“’The man with the dog-face set a fire! And we’re late for dinner! Boom!’”_ He illustrated the culminating explosion by throwing up his hands, so that Jason Funderburker croaked in alarm. “Wow! This is huge. I wonder who will survive! Wirt is gonna be mad he had to wait to read this one.”

Next, he cast his eyes over at Garfield. He could read that one for real, sometimes, but the language of today’s strip was arcane. He’d just managed to very carefully sound out the whole of _“La-sag-na,”_ before a dollop of oatmeal dropped from his spoon and erased the mystery word forever. “Oh, bungalow.” Wirt would be upset that Greg had dirtied up the comics before he got a chance to read them, so he tried to lick up the mess before it could set, but that only made things worse. While he balanced over the sink on a chair, wiping newspaper off his tongue, a little knock came gentle on the front door.

“Hello!” he bellowed. “I’m coming!” And when he opened the door, there was Sara standing on the front porch, with clumps of snow falling off the roof behind her. Greg always imagined what would happen on the day Wirt finally answered the knock instead. Maybe he'd scream. But to Greg, Sara was an old good friend by now.

“Hey, buddy.” Every morning, she gave him the same smile that only used the right side of her mouth, and asked him the same question: “You ready to go?”

“No,” he answered, like always, “but I have a really good reason why.” She slipped inside and closed the door behind her, careful to not step her wet shoes off the welcome mat. “The sun didn’t come up today! Well, my teacher says that it does come up even when you can’t see it, but she also says that people have electricity in their brains, so--” He made a little cuckoo-circle around his ear. “Hey, Sara? Did you know that lightning was discovered by Einstein? He used it to make a monster, and he named the monster Frank Einstein. That’s a rock fact.”

“That’s a good one. I like it.” But she wasn’t looking at him; she was looking up at the ceiling above the kitchen. “Hey, is your mom up yet?”

He hadn’t really thought about it. “I don’t know!”

“Okay. My mom said she hasn't heard from her in almost a week, so...” She wrapped herself tight in her arms. “How about you? Are you doing alright?”

“Yeah, except that I’m running late and I put my mittens on too early. Hey, I have a really important question. What’s la-sag-na?” She shook her head to say she didn’t know. “Will you write me a note so I remember to ask Wirt when he gets back? I can’t spell it.”

Sara leaned back against the door with a thump. Her hair trailed along the wood as she slipped down to sit on the carpet, and she didn’t say anything for a minute, or answer his question when she did.

“It’s getting late.” Her face was shifted off toward the living room, so he couldn’t see it. “I’ve got to bring you to school.”

Greg wasn’t ready to go yet, though, so he invited her to sit down in his dad’s La-Z-Boy while he finished packing his bag. She wanted to stay by the door. He made himself a fresh delicious peanut-butter-jelly sandwich, which was something he’d gotten very good at remembering to do after the first couple days in November that he got to the lunchroom and realized he didn’t have any food. He slid his planner and his pencil box and his PBJ all nice and neat into the three pockets of his backpack, zip-zip-zip, and laid his school supplies carefully by the door with a proud feeling. Sure, having someone else to take care of these sorts of things was nice, but there was really something to be said for being a self-sufficient man. Finally, he grabbed the funny pages off the kitchen table. “Almost done,” he told Sara. “I gotta brush my teeth.” And if she said anything back to him, his thumps up the stairs were too loud for him to hear it.

Even after all this time, Greg always expected to have to wait to get into the bathroom when he needed it. Now the door sat wide and dark, and instead of the air inside being warm and wet and smelling like shampoo and deodorant, it was cool and dry and smelled like nothing. He laid the newspaper on the counter and foamed up his whole mouth with toothpaste. He even scrubbed his tongue for extra freshness. Back before Halloween, when he was a little kid, he would never have done that unless someone made him, but Dad had said that they were going to need him to be more like a grown-up now, and Greg really felt up to the challenge. At the moment that he spat out the gritty mint, he thought he heard a sigh from down the hall.

“Mom?” he called. He was probably just imagining it, but he brought the newspaper with him anyway to check. Mom’s bedroom door hung open the littlest bit, and the inside was black as the middle of the night. She didn’t move in bed when he lit up the wall behind her with bright winter glow. “Good morning, Mommy-o,” he chirped. A hand crested over the top of the blanket. “It’s a snow day, but there’s still school, so that’s the bad news! If you’re staying home again today, I think you should make a snowman. If it starts to snow more later, and the power shuts off and we all have to go home early in the blizzard, I’ll make you hot cocoa. Did you know that snow used to be blue like a sno-cone? But all the syrup drained out in the sky, like that spot in the dining room. That’s a rock fact.” From downstairs, Jason Funderburker made an urgent little _yorp_. “I think we'll make Christmas ornaments today in school. They’re made of gingerbread, but this year I won’t eat mine, because I want to give it to you. Okay, Sara’s waiting for me. I love you!”

She’d given him enough _Love you forever_ s in the past that he knew she would have said it now too, if she were awake.

Just one last thing to do. Greg shouldered open the door to Wirt’s room and went light-footed across the carpet, because Dad always said not to come in here, and old habits died hard even when there was no one to enforce the rules. On the desk, a fancy little teacup glinted in the only light coming in between the curtains, and the closet was closed and the bed rumpled in the exact same way it had been for a long time now. On the floor next to the hamper, Greg hefted a couple months’ worth of funny pages in order to place the newest issue at the bottom. He squared up the edges and tamped down the dog-ears. Wirt had always liked routine, and Greg knew he’d be really glad that someone had saved the comics for him to read when he got back, just as much as Greg would be glad to have someone to read them to him again. He skipped out of the room without thinking about the noise he was making this time, and headed back downstairs.

 _“I’ll catch up,”_ was what Wirt had said right before Greg left the Unknown without him, but Wirt was smart, and very tricky sometimes. _“I’ll catch up,”_ he’d promised, but he never said when. That was the loophole in the deal. Greg just had to be patient.

Lots of things had changed since Halloween. His brother would be back home any day now, and he would have a lot of catching up to do indeed.


End file.
